Unequal struggle

‘How do you feel when you go back to Gary?’ I ask Joe Stiglitz. ‘Well, frankly, I get depressed,’ he replies. ‘The American middle class was created in places like my home town and is now struggling badly — which makes me sad.’

Stiglitz, a Nobel prize-winning economist and the closest thing the left has to an intellectual superstar, grew up in Gary, Indiana, during the 1950s, when it was the heart of the booming US steel industry. His father sold insurance and his mother was a teacher. ‘We had a modest detached brick house, with a lawn all around — it was safe and secure,’ he recalls. ‘Back then, if you worked hard and played by the rules in America, you’d make it — you could get ahead.’

Gary’s steel mills closed in the 1970s and thousands of skilled workers were laid off; the population has since halved, and Stiglitz says parts of his old neighbourhood ‘look like a war zone’. Countless cities have suffered the same fate, he says. ‘Gary is emblematic of the American Dream and that dream no longer exists.’

For Stiglitz, Gary’s demise isn’t so much due to globalisation — foreign competition for the US steel industry — as to the response in subsequent decades of Reaganite and Thatcherite ‘supply-siders’ preaching light intervention and low state spending. ‘There’s a large church in Gary that was once very beautiful but now lies ruined — in utter disrepair,’ he says. ‘It’s a symbol of what America does to its people and cities — you’ve worked for us, served us well and now you’re going in the garbage.’